Running frotz on OSX El Capitan 10.11.3

Hello! I love Frotz and IF. I’ve played a lot before on other computers. But now I’m trying to install on a Mac, and I’m having a lot of problems. I hope someone can help.

At ifarchive.org, I downloaded frotz-2.41-MacOSX.dmg.sit by Mike Johnson. I downloaded the latest version of Stuffit Expander to unpack it. At first I was getting an error that said “Legacy image should be converted.” I managed to fix this by going into Disk Utility, and converting it.

Finally I opened “frotz for Mac OS X (1.5)”. Inside was a beautiful graphic from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, some entertaining “Read Me First” text, a folder full of frotz documentation, and an icon that said, “Install frotz.mpkg”.

And here I am stuck. Because every time I double-click on that “Install frotz.mpkg” icon, it starts to take me through the installation process, and then when I click “install” it says “The installation failed. The Installer could not install the software. The Installer could not install the software because there was no software to install.”

I know that once frotz is installed, I will have to use the Terminal to write the command “frotz” and then the file path… I have no problem with that. But the installation itself doesn’t seem to work and I’ve run out of ideas.

Thanks for reading this, and hoping someone can help,
Ian

That package was built in 2002; it will certainly be a binary for PPC Macintoshes. It will not run on any Mac made in the past ten years.

You can compile command-line Frotz from source, if you have the Mac dev tools installed. I believe you can also get it from package managers like Homebrew.

To expand on the latter part of what Zarf sez…

[code]brew install homebrew/games/frotz

==> Tapping homebrew/games
Cloning into ‘/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-games’…
remote: Counting objects: 180, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (176/176), done.
remote: Total 180 (delta 4), reused 42 (delta 3), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (180/180), 137.45 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (4/4), done.
Tapped 174 formulae (202 files, 437.8K)
==> Installing frotz from homebrew/games
==> Downloading https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/archive/2.44.tar.gz
==> Downloading from https://codeload.github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/tar.gz/2.44
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> make frotz
==> make install
/usr/local/Cellar/frotz/2.44: 9 files, 132.4K, built in 4 seconds

[/code]

and then…

frotz FROTZ V2.44 curses interface.

I then loaded the Zork II .z5 file as a test and it works fine in my terminal. I’m currently on OSX version 10.12.2

Remotely related to your solution:
I have both a PC and a Sierra Mac. On my PC, when I play Zork Zero, I
prefer using Windows Frotz because Frotz allows me to undo multiple
moves. On my Mac, I play Zork Zero the old way, without Frotz, in Boxer,
where I can only undo one move, but the graphics are fine. But only a
DOS version of Frotz works in Boxer, and Zork Zero graphics don’t work
with any DOS version of Frotz. Maybe you techies know something I don’t?
Is there absolutely no way to get the Zork Zero graphics to work with
Frotz in Boxer?